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IBM Acquires the Weather Company's Digital Business (techcrunch.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the watson-weather dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Times reports that IBM has agreed to acquire the Weather Company's data and digital properties including Weather.com and Weather Underground news sites. The deal does not include the Weather Channel. Techcrunch reports: "According to IBM, the acquisition helps it to harness one of the largest big data opportunities in the world: weather. That's something that impacts one-third of the world's GGP and in the U.S. alone, accounts for about half a trillion dollars in impact, the company notes. The deal will combine two big data platforms, IBM's cognitive and analytics business with that of Weather. Currently, The Weather Company has the fourth-most visited mobile app in the U.S. and handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services daily, generating about 4 GB of data per second. Following the acquisition, IBM's Watson will be able to tap into more data sets, including Weather's mobile and web properties, which analyze data from 3 billion weather forecast reference points, over 40 million mobile phones, and 50,000 flights per day."

32 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Weather.com is complete shit by hsmith · · Score: 2

    It is full of shitty ads, takes forever to load, every "story" is just clickbait bullshit garbage.

    Congrats on buying Buzzfeed for weather, IBM.

    1. Re:Weather.com is complete shit by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      The Weather Company is the parent company of The Weather Channel. They are 70% owned by the Rothchilds.

      I just knew it! It's a Zionist conspiracy to control the weather!

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:Weather.com is complete shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      bit Wunderground.com is prwtty good still. they havent nerfed it too bad.

  2. Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by Hadlock · · Score: 2

    Someone please say it's true?!? IBM please revive Wunderground classic! The new framework is an atrocity, give me back my Wunderground!
     
    Sincerely, A weather nerd

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
    1. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by kheldan · · Score: 1

      I only discovered Wunderground about a year ago, what did it used to look/work like?

      Sincerely,
      Another weather nerd (I spend so much time outside that watching the weather is a routine daily activity)

      --
      Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
    2. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by SuperRenaissanceMan · · Score: 1

      I only discovered Wunderground about a year ago, what did it used to look/work like?

      It was wonderful!

      --
      Any comment mentioning moderation is automatically Offtopic.
    3. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by CBM · · Score: 2

      I'm a weather nerd and I think the new site is freaking awesome. The new forecast charts are brilliant. They have dew point on the chart which is great. The new radar is OK but you can always click through to the NexRad screen for higher resolution.

    4. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by Hadlock · · Score: 4, Informative

      Basically the original Wunderground.com site was very, very data dense, and had lots of links to specific views of weather data, data patterns, forecasts including aviation and maritime. You also got a post-it note sized wundermap view of your local area with all of this data. Rather than getting a TV man weather report, they gave you a full weather station with all the relevant data feeds. It was very transparent and if you disagreed with the weather report, there was enough data go dig in and decide if the model was off, or if that weather pattern would impact your local area.
       
      The new "web 2.0" redesign dumped most of that data deep in the website, or hid it completely. Rather than having an all-in-one page, you were forced to hunt for relevant information. Data density dropped way, way down as well, which made it harder to put together a coherent picture yourself. If you just wanted to know if it was going to be sunny on Saturday, the new Wunderground was for you. If you were a hard core weather junkie who helped build up the site by telling all your friends about it for the last 15 years, it was total garbage. Since wunderground's primary audience was talented nerds, the new design did not go over well, and it didn't offer anything special (other than Wundermap which is a polished feed of the high resolution radar data now avalible for $$$ from NOAA) so it just kind of died due to absolutely shit management not understanding their core audience, and then alienating them by turning off classic.wunderground.com earlier this year.
       
      Here's a NYT article on the topic
       
      Here's a blog post detailing the changes
       
        OLD - Here is a screenshot of "Classic" Wunderground, essentially unchanged from 2002 or so when the site really took off: https://i.imgur.com/7PA9TQF.png
       
        NEW - Here is the site with it's "web 2.0 redesign" that went in to beta around 2010 and finally completely replaced Wunderground Classic in 2015: https://i.imgur.com/P7SU61J.png
       
      The old site had it's fans for their reasons and it wasn't for everyone, but it was still the best online weather station data aggregator when they finally put it down. The only thing that could have made it beter was some sort of integration with stormpulse (I reccomend Cyclocane as a free alternative)

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
    5. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      Yes, damnit. It's just Endless September gone exponential.

      My head would asplode except there is nothing left inside it.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    6. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1
      The new site is slow as molasses. It takes about 10 to 15 seconds to load a page. The old site was nearly instantaneous to load. It ised to load as quickly as this weather site.

      .
      The original incarnation of the new site was an abomination, a perfect example of the bad web design that is afflicting the web nowadays: poor font contrast, slow load times, excessive click requirements, etc. Basic current weather information required multiple clicks to access.

      At least the current version of the new site eliminates the excessive clicking. But it is gawdawful slow.

      I've been a member of the WU site for a few years (I'm grandfathered at $5 a year). I was thinking of punting the membership, but now I think I'll wait another year to see if IBM can fix the site's slowness and make it useful again.

    7. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by Jayfar · · Score: 3, Informative

      Did someone say classic?

      $ telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com
      Trying 38.102.137.140...
      Connected to rainmaker.wunderground.com.
      Escape character is '^]'.

    8. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by jhjjhj · · Score: 1

      I prefer the new design, although it took some getting used to.

      It works much, much better for narrow windows

      the 10 day graph, customized to add dew point has most of what I am interested in.

      You can change that graph to table or descriptive form if that's more useful.

      looking at the screenshots I don't see any information missing in the new screen. The new screen is 30% larger, but with a bigger font, so a better comparison would need to shift the size down.

    9. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by drew870mitchell · · Score: 1

      As a nerd but not a weather nerd, I've been using wunderground since the first I ever knew of it (~2000). I did not think the redesign was a step backwards, but then I'm sure there are things that are of interest to wx foamers that I wasn't seeing.

      Wunderground still absolutely thrashes the other major weather websites. I haven't ventured there in a couple years but I know the last time I visited weather.com it was so fugly, clickbaity, ad-riddled and just generally awful that I would rather navigate warez filesharing/download sites.

      FWIW Stormpulse's website appears that it wouldn't show me any information until I "Signed in with LinkedIn" - I understand running a business and selling data, but, fuck that noise always and forever.

    10. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! by kheldan · · Score: 1

      Huh. I found it just after they 'updated' it, then.
      Frankly I would have been OK with either form of it. I don't have that much of a problem with the way it is now, with one notable exception: It's bloated as hell, functionally speaking. It takes what seems like an inordinate amount of time for the page to load and finish executing, probably because of the Flash and Java content used to run it. Otherwise I'm more or less OK with the way the data is presented. I'm not a big fan of animations-for-the-sake-of-animations, though; the graph feature is an efficient way to present temp/wind/humidity/precipitation information, but the amount of perceived effort it takes for it to animate the expansion of a particular day is, in my opinion, pointless window-dressing that serves no functional purpose. I do agree with you about the WunderMap, though, currently if I want to see NEXRAD, I'll go to the NWS page instead and look at it there instead of at WU.

      --
      Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
  3. Good thing I get my weather from the NWS... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can't wait to see how IBM outsources the fucking weather.

    1. Re:Good thing I get my weather from the NWS... by plopez · · Score: 1

      I was about to say, if anyone can screwup weather reporting its IBM. They destroy everything they touch and have a habit of buying and clinging to dying tech.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  4. Weather channel sucks by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Replacing the realty shit with automated screens will be better.

  5. Re:Wunderground Classic revival?!?! No way. by mmell · · Score: 1

    C'mon, Big Blue has it now. My guess - they'll try to find a way to charge for the weather widgets/desktop gadgets. Either that, or make 'em so complex it'll take a SME and a support team to get it working.

  6. More like David. Less like Goliath. by mmell · · Score: 1

    (N/T)

  7. Public securitization by ElitistWhiner · · Score: 2

    Wunderground hosts private weather stations across the U.S. in a broad brushstroke data collection that deepens the weather data pool. IBM obviously has the power to submarine down into those depths revealing chaos patterns and resolving a weather picture unattainable. For a price!

    Fun to see WallSt. takeover the backcountry reporting stations, backyard weather rigs and blend them into a special sauce just for paying customers. What are the chances JonQPublic finds free access benefit from their free contribution? What are the chances local impacts can be forecast better with IBM?

    1. Re:Public securitization by DougOtto · · Score: 1

      As someone who has been feeding weather data to them for a number of years, I'm concerned......

      --
      Solving Unix problems since 1989...
  8. IBM acquires Weather infrastructure by StewBaby2005 · · Score: 2

    Probably the only way they could keep the contract...

    1. Re:IBM acquires Weather infrastructure by tchdab1 · · Score: 1

      Look for weather infrastructure support opportunities opening up in Brazil and India.

  9. Weather Central != The Weather Company by tepples · · Score: 1

    The article you linked mentions Weather Central, which is not The Weather Company. The Weather Company is owned by Blackstone, Bain, and NBCUniversal.

  10. In related news by theid0 · · Score: 1

    Amazon is also interested in cloudy big data: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/a...

    Perhaps the assistance from The Weather Company is not completely unrelated to today's announcement.

  11. Weather Underground by p51d007 · · Score: 1

    Shame...I love the photo side of that website.

  12. But how much does Rothschild still own? by tepples · · Score: 1

    From the linked article: "In 2012, Weather Services International, a sister company to The Weather Channel, announced an agreement to acquire Weather Central." If The Weather Company has acquired Weather Central, doesn't that mean E.L. Rothschild LLC no longer owns it?

  13. Re: Sounds Familiar by plopez · · Score: 1

    Given that weather seems to be a higher order non-linear system with thousands of inputs with sensitivity to initial conditions as well as sensitivity to rounding errors that would be a neat trick.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  14. Generated data by tchdab1 · · Score: 1

    4 Gb of data per second - and that's probably just the metadata from the client queries.

  15. IBM Cloud Technology by TheRealDilbert · · Score: 2

    Sounds like par for the course for the MBA's running IBM these days. They convinced themselves "cloud" is the next big thing, so they picked up their iPhones and asked Siri "What is an established company that has a lot of experience in cloud analytics?". Siri came back with "Weather.com" - and the rest is history (unfortunately big blue is history too...)

  16. Re: Cognitive and IoT by IBME · · Score: 1

    I am not surprised by how stupid people are on slashdot in thinking that that some turd server has a fuck thing to do with weather at all. Sure, planes and ships need to know what is directly ahead. People hiking in the wilderness too. But to think that some fucktard ap somehow can make the sun shine when you want it to is pathetic to the core. Weather is a lot about attraction and has nothing whatsoever to do with computer modeling and prediction. Stick that in your toddlers thinking cap idiots.

  17. Not just what's in the summary by Dripdry · · Score: 1

    Keep in mind, the Big Boys are using weather when it comes to the stock market now, too.
    IBM's gonna make a killing selling this data to brokers and HFT.

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    -